Borrowed Ships
by Vampire-Badger
Summary: Because there's still the bleeding effect, there's always, the bleeding effect, even when it's not your ancestor.


**Takes place in ACIV, but no spoilers, promise. :) Unless I guess maybe you don't know where the modern day stuff takes place, but I'm pretty sure if you're reading this you probably know that.**

It's the strangest place he'd ever worked at. Hands down, no arguments, even more so than his brief stint as a manager for a haunted house that one October he really needed a job and no one else was crazy enough to apply. There's just something about Abstergo, and it isn't the too-fancy decor, or the way everyone seems to be hiding secrets all the time, or the IT guy who keeps sending him to hack into his coworker's computers.

It takes him a while to figure it out, but eventually he gets it; the strange thing about working at Abstergo is... everyone else that's working at Abstergo. Not the higher ups, the ones that issued the orders and saw the 'big picture'. Although they have their share of strangeness too. No, it's the people that work the front line, plugged into the animi all day, that rub him the wrong way.

Nobody likes to talk about what they actually see. Or... experience. They gather in small huddles, people they trust, and whisper. They never speak loudly, but they're talking about the... the feelings that come from the animi. He still isn't sure what that's all about, to be honest. During his first day at Abstergo, when he'd been plugged ino the animus... 'calibrations', they'd called it... he'd experienced everything he saw in the animus as though it was actually happening to him. Not to some long dead pirate. But when he'd switched to working through a computer screen, it had gotten better. For a while. Then it starts up again. The first time he notices, he's halfway through a memory, boarding a ship and fighting off its crew.

It's a large ship. Too large, to be honest, but he's been overconfident, and now he's paying for it. His crew are dying around him, and his own health is dropping fast. It's a hard fight, but he stubbornly refuses to give up. If he just pushes a little harder- a little farther- they'll break. They have to.

And then- they do. The crew of the other ship falls away, laying down weapons, surrendering at last. And he feels a surge of triumph, intense, almost vicious, and far greater than what he should have felt. It takes him a minute to realize these are not his feelings. They're Edward's, and the thought scares him so much that he logs out of the animus and spends the rest of the day catching up on his email backlog.

But he can't stay out forever, and the next time he logs in it happens again. And again. And soon it's just another part of the job. He gets used to it. He manages. He tells himself it doesn't matter, and he just gets on with the memories, because that's what they pay him for after all, and he's not going to make this much working anywhere else.

Sometimes he dreams as Edward. When he wakes up, he just lies there, staring at the ceiling of his apartment, trying to remember his own name. Sometimes it takes longer than it should. But he convinces himself, somehow, that it's all worth it. This isn't exactly a great economy, and this is the first job he's had in eight months. He can't just walk out on it now.

So he learns to just deal. With bosses that keep secrets, and coworkers that never speak above a whisper, and most of all with the eighteenth century pirate living in his head.

...he tells himself he learns to deal, but he never really does.

One day he's on an island.

..._Edward _is on an island. Edward.

It's not a big memory. It's not an important one. He's just running around killing ocelots, because apparently that's a thing pirates did. But still. It's a nice little island, and he's feeling... good. Content, anyway. Or maybe Edward is, he can't tell the difference anymore. But he's running across a beach. And the sun is coming up, and out of the sunrise comes the _Jackdaw_, and she's just beautiful.

And he thinks, with a fierce burst of pride- _That's my ship_.

Only it isn't, of course. It's Edward's. But for the first time, the distinction doesn't seem to matter so much. Because those feelings might belong to a dead man, but he's the one wiping tears away. So maybe it's Edward's ship.

Maybe he can just borrow it for a while.


End file.
